Market Commentary

There are a few different ways to analyze market breadth, a measure of health which identifies the number of stocks rising versus falling. Intuitively, we know that if more stocks are rising than falling then it means markets are probably going higher. The opposite holds true for a down market.

Yet, our current market shows some deep divergences in breadth vs. the price index, namely very weak overall breadth yet a market within 2% of all time highs. Seemingly only a handful of stocks ar...

The Street assumed that the Fed's silence on raising interest rates in 2015 means no rate hike this year. That may not be true, but it put the S&P500 mini-futures back into a bullish cycle and helped it hold the price above the key 2100 psychology line.

The futures pretty much duplicated Wednesday’s action: dropped sharply from the overnight high and made a low one point above Wednesday’s low, then climbed back up to make a high half a point below Wednesday’s high, and closed one point above...

One of the more nuanced aspects of earnings season is the combination of analyst actions after earnings announcements and the coinciding activity in the Equity options. Typically analysts and research firms render their respective opinions and adjustments after the announcements of earnings, guidance, and conference calls of the companies. When earnings per share, revenues, and guidance beat analysts’ expectations, market participants typically witness upgrades, reiterations with price targ...

For the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about the death of the personal computer. Soon there will be a world where everyone will hold nothing but their smartphones, tablets and wrist computers. That itself sounds so science fiction not that long ago.

I agree, personal computer sales are slowing as more and more consumers migrate across to the mobile world of smartphones and tablets, but from observation as well as from personal experience, these new gadgets are just an extension ...

If you’ve been reading my commentary over the past five weeks on TraderPlanet you’ve probably noticed a couple that were focused on the Nasdaq ETF . To me this has been a great way to filter out single stock earnings risk from the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Google in the more volatile tech/social media area of the market.

Moving forward to the present day, I’ve changed my tune from bearish to bullish . On July 29th, this was reaffirmed by stocks tacking on gains after t...

Featured Stories

When I sit down to write for TraderPlanet, I typically mull over things that have occurred the same day in my coaching practice. It seems the fresher the experience, the more easily it can be milked for a few drops of insight.

Tonight I had the pleasure of working with an aspiring futures trader, a corporate pilot by day who has dreams of retiring from flying and leveraging his navigational abilities to become a successful private trader. This is indeed a dream shared by many.

It is a fact that liquidity in the markets has been decreasing for some time now. This is not just a feature of the holiday period, but certainly is more noticeable between mid July to around the third week in August. Thinning liquidity is in part due to the over mature long term cycle we are finding ourselves in.

Banks cannot trade as they used to due to tightening of regulations, low interest rates having taken their toll on profits, and investors are nervous of the future. The closure of...

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Bertrand Russell

We will at some point in time publish a full in depth article in terms of how Central bankers have been actively employing psychological strategies to deceive the masses for generations. In essence, central bankers have been recreating reality, and the sad part is that the masses now assume that this altered reality is the new norm. We are going to illustrate this by highlighting excerpts...

Brett found trading confidence elusive. "If only I was more confident, I'd be a better trader," Brett explained. What might cultivate more confidence? "Making more winning trades, of course." Sorry, that’s the wrong answer.

The Source of True Trading Confidence

Trading confidence doesn’t come from the number of winning trades, how much money was won, or other ‘statistical’ measures. True trading confidence comes from mastering the various skills needed to read the market and execute and ...